[pulseaudio-discuss] pulseaudio creates null-sink and crashes

[Tanu Kaskinen]

On Fri, 2016-10-14 at 16:18 +0200, Marco Trapanese wrote:
> Hi!
> On the same configuration of the previous email (Raspian Jessie Lite,
> BlueZ 5.40, PA 8.0, ofono 1.18) when I start A2DP the bluetooth sink
> is replaced by a null sink, and after a while pulseaudio crashes due
> to a segmentation fault.

While pulseaudio should never crash, this crash happens when the daemon
is shutting down, so the crash isn't your biggest problem.

In order to debug the crash, a backtrace is needed. If you want to
provide that, here are some instructions:
https://wiki.freedesktop.org/www/Software/PulseAudio/Documentation/User/Community/

> I attach the log.
> I don't see an clear cause for this. Please, would you help me to
> investigate further about this behavior?

It looks like you switch from HSP to the A2DP source profile. The A2DP
source profile doesn't have a sink associated with it, and no other
sinks exist either, so that's why the null sink gets loaded. It's
module-always-sink that ensures that there's always at least one sink
in the system.

Pulseaudio shuts down, because there are no clients. The automatic
shutdown is normally prevented by module-systemd-login, which keeps
pulseaudio running as long as you're logged in, but apparently you
don't have any login sessions active (maybe you logged in via ssh - I'm
not sure, but ssh might not register a login session in systemd-
logind).

You can put "exit-idle-time = -1" to /etc/pulse/daemon.conf to disable
the automatic shutdown.

-- 
Tanu